I TURNED 31 on September 6, 2001. At the time, my girlfriend, Erica, and I shared a studio apartment in New York City, three blocks south of the World Trade Center. We spent my birthday on the West Coast, a beautiful day in Los Angeles. A couple of days later, I went to KFK Jewelers on West Third. The jewelers agreed to custom-design an engagement ring and mail it to me in NYC. Erica and I were headed there the next day.

Which was September 10, 2001. Sometime on the following day, I started keeping a journal.

88 Greenwich Street, NY, NY
9-11-01

WENT TO BED AT three last night after writing a song, “Lovebird,” and making love with Erica. About 9 a.m., heard two loud explosions. Didn’t fully awaken us. Phones started ringing. Mom on my cell (I missed it) and a college friend of Erica’s on the landline. It’s all very confused at first. It’s not unusual to hear construction in the morning, and I think I muttered a sleepy complaint about the loud noise.

Me to Erica: Babe, I think a plane just crashed into the World Trade. I’m going to go up to the terrace and check it out.

She says: You’re getting up? Can’t I keep sleeping?

Me: I think this is a big deal.

Terrace is locked. A girl getting on the elevator says we can go stand in the stairwell. There’s an opening with a view. A half-dozen people already there. Australian couple. He has a video camera. Good view. Girl in red-checked shirt on cell with her mom: I’m fine, I’m looking at it right now.

Flames shoot out either side of both towers. Flames shoot out of the building that houses the Amish Market, where we grocery shop. Bodies drop from a hundred floors up. One lands on the median, right in our line of sight. Firefighters and paramedics surround it, roll it on a stretcher, and carry it off.

I feel the beginning of something that’s hard to put into words. A mechanism that I developed during my adolescence, surviving in a broken home. I am distancing myself. I know it’s real. And I know it’s bad. But I’m not going to think, right now, about what it means.

I call my mom. She suggests we leave town immediately. I tell her she’s overreacting. For some stupid reason, I am thinking about our favorite local deli, Café World. How all the hubbub is going to make them sell out of sandwiches.

We go back to the apartment and turn on the TV. I’m on autopilot. I make a bowl of cereal and set it down on the table. A brown cloud full of debris engulfs our building. Our 14th-floor windows shake. The floor shakes. The brown cloud moves from the outside of the window in. The TV tells us that the south tower has collapsed. Our windows face south, away from the WT towers. My heart freezes. My asshole tightens. Erica starts screaming: We’ve got to get out of here.

We run to the door. The middle-aged couple across the hall is standing in their doorway.

E’s screaming at the woman: What do we do?

The woman’s screaming: I don’t know.

I check for my wallet and my keys before I realize that the only thing that matters is getting the hell out of there. We run out of the apartment. Erica wears little khaki shorts and a black Cancún T-shirt. I wear jeans and a white T. We are both wearing Birkenstocks. Bad running shoes. We make it down to the lobby, which is sardine-packed. Bloody, soot-covered people stream in. We go up to the second floor, where the smoke and soot are a little less thick.

I ask the assembled crowd: What’s the downside to going back up to our apartment? A guy sitting coolly with his back to the wall says: I wouldn’t want to be trapped up there if the building catches on fire. He’s got a point. A British guy says: Let’s go down to the gym in the basement. He takes off. Comes back a minute later and says there’s one stairway available to us and that it empties out onto the street 10 feet from an entrance to the basement. We gather our resolve and take off. The door opens out onto Rector. Normally, we’d be able to see the WTC from here. The air is thick and brown, rubbish and wreckage are all we see. It’s tricky terrain to navigate. Twisted metal, broken glass, scraps of burnt paper. We round the corner, pause at the basement door, look at each other and make a silent decision: Let’s just get the fuck out of here.

There’s no one else on the street.

I try twice to look back at the tower that still stands, but the cloud is too thick. We run. In our stupid Birks. Down to where the street dead-ends. South. Other people running. Now more in earnest. I wonder why. As I pass a cop (he’s wearing a face mask), he yells: The second tower just collapsed, get the hell out of here!

It occurs to me that if I had opened the outside door at the bottom of the stairwell two minutes later, we probably wouldn’t have survived.

We keep running until we get to the water. Smoking fragments of glass and metal rain down on our heads. E and I hold hands while we run. I pull her across the street and we use the FDR as cover, running beneath it so debris doesn’t land in our hair. I sneak two looks back. The smoke, the faces, the bloody people running and screaming.

Breathing feels like chewing and swallowing. We don’t stop running until we get well beyond the Brooklyn Bridge, and the breeze off the water has cleared out the air. I’m wondering about our building. Did the windows hold? Are the others trapped in the basement?

We wander until we hit Houston Street, take a left. Sirens and ambulances and screaming cops.

After we discover that our friend on Mulberry Street isn’t home, a stranger lets us into her apartment. E has to use the bathroom. I do too. Wash the soot out of my eyes.

Call my mom, who starts crying, which starts me crying. E calls her folks. We don’t know where to go. So, reflexively almost, we go to Buffa’s for eggs and bacon. Sweet old waitress is very nice and concerned. Radio on, real loud. President saying: We will hunt them down and punish them. Palestinian teenagers on TV, laughing and waving flags.

Stop at grocery store to get tampons and toothbrushes. The line wraps all the way around the store. I also buy this notebook.

298 Mulberry Street, NY, NY
9-12-01

WE SPEND THE NIGHT on our friend’s living-room floor. I dream in the morning of the falling businessman with the flailing arms. He swims through the air toward me. When he’s right in front of me he says: I’m dead.

Over and over, this happens.

We go to the one open clothes store in the area. We walk in and, almost immediately, the Middle Eastern owners come through, announcing: We’re closed, we’re closed. I am holding a pair of Converse sneakers (navy), some socks, and a pair of boxers (that end up being the biggest Medium I’ve ever seen). I still intend to pick up some shorts, T-shirts, etc. I almost start crying, tell him that all I have is the clothes I’m wearing. He looks horror-stricken. “Of course,” he says. “You take your time.” We go across the street to Chase Manhattan Bank and I take out $300. I give half to Erica, who has no wallet. Walking out of the bank, I realize I’ve left my notebook on the counter in the clothes store. I take off running. When the only thing you have in the world is a red spiral with 12 pages of journal entry and a pair of Cons, those things take on an extraordinary significance. The store owners let me in to retrieve my red notebook. Back outside, I drop it into the shopping bag and notice, for the first time, the name of the store: Ground Zero.

Six weeks ago, E’s parents came into the city to celebrate their 35th wedding anniversary. One night, we got high on the roof of our apartment, looking over at the WTC, and discussed crises, catastrophes, and disasters. E’s mom, who fled Hungary as a young girl and lived her whole childhood as a refugee, got a little emotional, making the point that our generation would be ill-equipped to deal with a catastrophe of any magnitude. “I mean, I don’t think you’d have any idea what to do,” she’d said.

Erica’s brother has a place in the Hudson Valley. We go to Grand Central by way of the 6 train. Hardly anybody is out, especially on the subway. We take the 3:12 to Beacon. As we speed through the tunnels and emerge alongside the Hudson, I keep repeating, in my head, the line I intend to utter once we are up around the Cloisters: I feel so much better now that we’re out of the city. And I do say these words, as I planned, but I don’t feel any better …

I’m leaving New York without my guitar. I have no guitar. No backpack, no cell phone, no organizer, no CD player, no CDs, no tape recorder. How little these things feel now, things that seemed crucial to my existence a day ago.

Later that night, as we lie on the guest-room bed, E whispers: I keep seeing those people fall. I wonder if they jumped or they … She trails off and falls asleep, making soft ugh noises occasionally as she drifts down.

Before I’m able to fall asleep, I hear some friends, also refugees, in the room below us having sex. I’m surprised to be reminded of humanity’s finer points.

Whiskey Hill Road, Wallkill, NY
9-13-01

MORNING IN THE HUDSON VALLEY. The wind has blown the algae to the edges of the pond. Crickets and cicadas. Poncho the dog sleeps in the foot-deep yellow flowers. I contemplate fishing, but can’t stomach the thought of catching something and having to put my hand around its squirming body and wrestle the hook from its face.

I can’t breathe through my nose. E wakes up coughing, hacking. Thick congestion rumbling in her throat.

I try to put on my sandals, but I can’t, because of the places where they rubbed into the flesh on the top of my left foot and my toes.

Barefoot, Erica and I walk to the edge of the pond and stand there for a long time in silence.

I DIDN’T WRITE A WORD about the engagement ring in the journal. I was afraid Erica would see it. And I didn’t want the ring to be wrapped up in tragedy. I was able to get in touch with the jewelers before they’d mailed it to our New York address, which was lucky, because the mail from that time was in limbo for months. We returned to 88 Greenwich a week later to collect whatever belongings we could gather in five minutes. We never lived in Manhattan again. We got married, had two kids, and now live in a quiet spot in the Hudson Valley. We don’t discuss the events of that day much anymore.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/about-that-day/8598/

Andrew Mueller – http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/6wd3
One of the many reasons that The Old 97s are such a great band is that they’ve always sounded slightly like frontman and primary songwriter Rhett Miller joined the wrong group by accident. The Old 97s are, as a collective, fundamentally fairly orthodox cowpunkers, bent on filling classic country templates with angry guitars and juddering drums. Miller, on his own account, is clearly largely animated by a love for songwriterly pop. His three prior solo albums – erratic, unfocused affairs – have been infused by such distinctively un-country influences as Ray Davies, Pete Shelley and Paul Weller.
The audaciously titled Rhett Miller is the Rhett Miller album that sounds most like an Old 97s album – which makes it, by some margin, Rhett Miller’s best Rhett Miller album yet. He seems to have found a way to resist whatever pressures he felt to starkly delineate his own records from those of his band. It is telling that the only dud moment on the album – the wretchedly overwrought, Bauhaus-ish science fiction hallucination Happy Birthday Don’t Die – is also the only one in which Miller sounds like he’s trying too hard to be someone other than himself.
When Miller sticks to what he’s good at – setting witty, oblique tales of everyday bewilderment to deceptively subtle not-quite-country tunes – he is, as ever, a marvel. Caroline, If It’s Not Love and I Need to Know Where I Stand are adroit negotiations between Miller’s competing loves for country and pop, riddled with characteristically waspish couplets (the latter, in particular, can only prompt amazement that it has taken this long for someone to rhyme “analysis” with “paralysis”). The wilfully underplayed closing tracks, Lashes and Sometimes, are all the more affecting for Miller’s deliberate short-circuiting of his innate cleverness and playing it straight-faced.
Nothing, however, will gladden the bruised heart of anyone familiar with Miller’s songwriting like the triumphant opening line of tears-in-the-beer lament Another Girlfriend: “The trouble with girls like you…” It would have been a better title for a fine album.
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Good Day Atlanta

This song, as well as the others featured on his solo album, were praised in the July issue of Relix magazine for showcasing his “sensual voice” and “killer guitar work”.  Relix Magazine

Sunday night at the Belly Up Tavern. An acoustic show by the singer of an alt-country band, whose solo work is even more mellow that than of said band. These are the things that should have tipped off this writer to the fact that the show would probably run on the earlier side.

Unfortunately, I failed to recognize this fact and, in doing so, completely missed out on hearing opener Jennifer O’Connor. Her album Over the Mountain, Across the Valley and Back to the Stars has garnered a lot of praise recently, so this was a bit of a let-down.

However, I managed to catch every minute of Rhett Miller’s set. I wasn’t sure what to expect in terms of material, since both his solo career and the Old 97’s catalog are quite extensive. What the audience got was Rhett with an acoustic guitar, singing his heart out and playing a mix of solo and Old 97’s songs.

All told, I counted twenty-two songs in his set list. Four of those were brand new Old 97’s songs that are going to be on their new record, out May 13. It still lacks a title, and when he told the audience this, someone yelled out “Call it ‘Rhett Sings!’” At that, Rhett chuckled and said he didn’t think the rest of the band would like that too much.

Even with such a long setlist and just one performer, everyone in the room was captivated. Rhett is an extremely charismatic person, and his songs are both endearing and witty, often conjuring up opposing imagery such as “She was a thin girl / But she had substance.” The man has a way with words in his songs as well as his on-stage banter, and more than a few times he had the crowd laughing along with him.

With many other performers, songs recorded with a full band (such as his work with the Old 97’s) played acoustically often leave a little something to be desired. But with Rhett, it just allowed his voice to take center stage, and he conveyed such passion through his voice that I never noticed the lack of other instruments or band members. At the end of his encore, people were yelling for one more song, but we all had to be content with the promise of a return (with the Old 97’s) in June.

Natalie Kardos, Impose Magazine, February 15, 2008

Alt-country favorites the Old 97′s are as reliable as a worn pair of cowboy boots and an old flannel shirt. The band has been playing for 15 years now, and they just released the album Blame It On Gravity.

Guitarist and vocalist Rhett Miller takes a break from their summer tour to talk about the group’s new album and the band’s career. Miller also performs some new songs and a few old hits.

In addition to playing in the Old 97′s, Miller has a successful solo career, having released three albums. His most recent recording, The Believer, was well-received by critics…listen to Rhett being interviewed and performing here.

NRP

The bash, at his three-acre spread in New York’s Hudson Valley, was set for the middle of the Dallas Cowboys’ regular-season opener against the Cleveland Browns, and although Miller hasn’t lived in Dallas for years, he clings to his love of the Cowboys and the Stars the same way he loyally clings to the Old 97’s, the band he formed in Dallas with old friend Murry Hammond in 1993.

Over the last 15 years, the group, frequently lumped into the alt-country subgenre, has released seven critically praised studio albums, while Miller has found the moonlighting time to make two slightly poppier solo albums, 2002’s The Instigator, and 2006’s The Believer (he says he’s currently sitting on “a pile of songs” for what he expects to be a quiet, acoustic solo record).

Four months ago, the Old 97’s returned to action after a four-year dormant period, with a new album, Blame It On Gravity, that ranks among their best. So it’s a little surprising that Miller will be coming to Sam’s Burger Joint on September 17 as an acoustic solo artist. Like his birthday plans, however, the mini-tour can be connected directly to his need for a Lone Star fix.

“There was that week before the ACL Festival, and I wanted to bring my whole family down to Texas for the week,” Miller says. “So I figured if I booked a few shows it would justify the trip, make a little dough, and keep my chops up. It’s just fun to do.”

Miller attended Dallas’s private St. Mark’s School in the ‘80s, two years behind a bad-boy football player named Owen Wilson. He remembers hearing from classmates that the teenage Wilson, who he describes as “immensely popular in a sort of effortless way,” had offered $15 to anyone who would beat up Miller, causing the future Old 97 to hide in the bushes for the entirety of a Friday-night football game. A sensitive outcast with soft, feminine features who’d failed at athletics, Miller went through a dark stretch in his mid-teens. He’d barely survived a suicide attempt at 14 and didn’t really find his emotional way until he devoted himself to music. Early on, his desperate need to reach people with his songs occasionally steered him away from his natural strengths.

By the time he formed the Old 97’s, he had nothing to lose. Four years earlier, at the age of 18, he’d generated national attention with a folky solo album called Mythologies, which reflected his teenage David Bowie preoccupations and the literary bent of his songwriting approach (“Song for Truman Capote”). When a Billboard review suggested that major-label A&R men would soon be knocking down his door, Miller became fixated on scoring a record deal. He tried on and disposed of new bands like socks, including one short-lived, Nirvana-inspired punk outfit named Rhett’s Exploding.

No one in Dallas could deny his knack for clever wordplay and winsome melodies, but some scenesters had taken to joking that if it was a new week, Rhett surely had a new band. Miller recalls the post-Mythologies/pre-Old 97’s period as one of extreme artistic confusion.

“It’s hard to second-guess anything, but I think a lot of the attention I got really early made me waste a couple of years,” he says. “When [the Billboard review ran], I kind of took that to heart a little bit, and I think I spent two or three years in there trying to make music that was going to be commercial. I think I was focusing so much on trying to score a major-label record contract, which is so funny that that’s what you shoot for: ‘I can’t wait to sign a contract. Boy, that’ll be great.’”

The Old 97’s took a deliberately low-key path, playing small, unpublicized shows in Austin, but it didn’t take long for them to catch on. They were never country purists, but they borrowed country’s rhythmic swing, which perfectly suited ironic, understated Miller narratives such as “Lonely Holiday” and “Indefinitely.”

“Murry brought so much of that [country influence] to the table,” Miller says. “He was the one who introduced me to a lot of the old-timey country music that really made it possible for me to like country music again. He’s the one who’s pushed that agenda a little more than I have over the years. But it’s good, because in the end it’s really just folk music, and that’s what I grew up loving, with the Kingston Trio and Bob Dylan.”

The band’s devoted fan base has long included actor Vince Vaughn, who wrote them into his 2006 comedy film, The Break-Up , for an extended concert scene (Jennifer Aniston’s character invites ex-boyfriend Vaughn to an Old 97’s show, and he stands her up). “It was a really good exerience,” Miller says. “It’s not like it made such a real difference in our career necessarily, but if somebody says, ‘I don’t really know who your band is,’ you can say, ‘Did you see that movie?’ It validates us in their eyes.”

Married with two young children, Miller has learned over the last five years to adjust to the loss of the solitary time that most songwriters depend upon.

“I built an office in my garage, and the door locks, but as soon as I get down there and come up with an idea, [the kids] are knocking on the door. They’re so sweet, I can’t kick ‘em out. You know, they’ve always got ideas for their own songs. They’re always about poopy or martians.”

Since 1998, the Old 97’s have followed the Pavement long-distance band model, with Miller, Hammond, lead guitarist Ken Bethea, and drummer Phil Peeples scattered across the country. It’s a testament to the band’s confidence that they’ll often begin a tour with no more than a long opening-night soundcheck for rehearsal.

“It’s funny,” he says. “Every single night of my life I have dreams about being in the band – being in the hotel or on the stage. It’s almost like I see those guys every night in my dreams anyway. How can I miss them if they won’t go away?”

Gilbert Garcia, SA Current, September 10, 2008